V8 Benchmark

Kraken Benchmark

Conclusion

OK, with the testing out of the way, what conclusions can we draw?

Firefox 9.0 features a new JavaScript improvement by Mozilla called Type Inference (more technical information here). This compilation mode, which is the default in Firefox 9, is supposed to speeds up major benchmarks like Kraken and V8 by over 30%, and gives a large speed boost to many JavaScript heavy websites. And the performance gains are there to be seen (except in The SunSpider Benchmark test, where Firefox 9 gives almost the exact same result as Firefox 8).

Good work Mozilla!

UPDATE: The difference between Chrome 15 and Chrome 16 is marginal. However, in all three tests, Chrome 16 appears to be slower than Chrome 15.

IE 9 32-bit topped one test, and Chrome 15 topped the other two, so overall it's fair to say that Chrome 15 is the winner. But when you take a deeper dive into the data, things aren't that clear cut. For example, when it comes to the SunSpider test, the five browsers are separated by less than 60 milliseconds. What's more, a little over 10 milliseconds separates Opera 11, Chrome 15, Firefox 9 and Firefox 8. This could have been anyone's race!

Other tests are more clear cut. Chrome 15 was the clear winner of the V8 benchmark test (bear in mind that the V8 is a Google benchmark). Chrome 15 also wiped the floor with the competition in the Kraken 1.1 test too, being nearly twice as fast as the nearest rival Firefox 8 (which itself was almost twice as fast as its nearest rival).

So, what's the bottom line? Looking at the data, and combining this with real-world usage, I really don’t think that JavaScript performance is an issue any more. In real-world testing it’s almost impossible to see a difference between the browsers (some HTML 5 sites not withstanding, given that many are optimized for a particular browser). In fact, unless one of the players managed to boost JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude, shaving a few milliseconds off here and there hardly matters any more.

Also, given how well IE 9 performed in these tests, sticking with the default browser that comes with Windows no longer gives you an inferior web experience.